Mainstreaming Scientific Racism

Dan Hicks & Emilio Lobato

University of California, Merced
https://mainstream-race-science.netlify.app

Introduction

The return(?) of race science


Saini (2019)

Many people assumed that the eugenicists had all but disappeared with the Nazi regime, and that race science was pretty much finished at the same time.

Intellectual racism has always existed, and indeed for a chunk of history, it thrived. I believe it is still the toxic little seed at the heart of academia. However dead you might think it is, it needs only a little water, and now it’s raining.

Institutions of race science

Pioneer Fund
Founded 1937, during the decline of (institutionalized) eugenics
(Mehler 1989; Tucker 2002)
Mankind Quarterly
Founded 1960 by marginalized academics as part of the backlash to Brown v Board (Mehler 1989; Schaffer 2007; Jackson 2005 ch. 7)


The Tobacco Strategy
Used by regulated industries to create the appearance of legitimate scientific controversy and thereby block or delay regulation
(Oreskes and Conway 2011; Fernández Pinto 2017)

Echo chambers

  • “creation and distribution of non-peer reviewed journals and pamphlets”
  • “funding and organizing of symposiums” for industry-funded research
  • “In this way, the tobacco industry circumvented peer review standards in publication” (Fernández Pinto 2017)
  • “a bounded, enclosed media space that has the potential to both magnify the messages delivered within it and insulate them from rebuttal” (Jamieson and Cappella 2008, 76)

Did Pioneer and Mankind Quarterly nurture race science by protecting it from mainstream peer review?
Our analysis indicates MQ did not play this role

Mainstreaming race science

Pioneer-funded researchers

Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. psychology
Brunetto Chiarelli anthropology?
Hans Eysenck psychology
Robert Gordon sociology
Linda Gottfredson psychology
Garrett Hardin ecology
Joseph M. Horn psychology
Lloyd Humphreys psychology
Arthur Jensen psychology
Michael Levin philosophy
Richard Lynn psychology
R. Travis Osborne psychology
J. Phillippe Rushton psychology
Audrey M. Shuey psychology
Philip A. Vernon psychology
Daniel Vining, Jr. demography


  • WoS author search results for 14 authors (Sept/Oct 2021)
  • Identify journals that published more than 5/14

Pioneer-funded researchers

Journals publishing 6 or more Pioneer-funded researchers, WOS author search results

Text-mining corpus

Behavior Genetics 2268
Behavioral & Brain Sciences 898
Intelligence 1237
Mankind Quarterly 1821
Personality & Individual
Differences		 7274
Psychological Reports 21398
  • 34k journal articles
  • Published 1960-2010

Topic modeling

Diachronic evolution of topic categories in Philosophy of Science, 1934-2015. Malaterre, Chartier, and Pulizzotto (2019) fig. 2.

  • Statistical method for clustering documents and words simultaneously


  • Can we identify a race science topic?
  • Does this topic start in MQ, spread to mainstream journals?

UMAP interactive

UMAP visualization of Hellinger similarity, medium vocabulary, k = 30

3 focal topics

topic 5 topic 7 topic 19
phrase beta phrase beta phrase beta
jensen 0.0087 0.0142 iq 0.0152
iq 0.0076 europe 0.0060 jensen 0.0078
rt 0.0067 book 0.0056 whites 0.0058
general_intelligence 0.0050 africa 0.0054 blacks 0.0056
vernon 0.0045 religion 0.0049 lynn 0.0043
sternberg 0.0042 races 0.0049 general_intelligence 0.0038
inspection_time 0.0034 whites 0.0045 iqs 0.0035
slope 0.0032 india 0.0040 rushton 0.0031
rts 0.0029 death 0.0040 iq_scores 0.0029
digits 0.0027 _ 0.0038 cognitive_ability 0.0028
nettelbeck 0.0027 god 0.0037 subtests 0.0027
deary 0.0025 op 0.0034 wechsler 0.0026
raven 0.0024 mankind_quarterly 0.0033 racial_differences 0.0025
general_factor 0.0024 blacks 0.0033 brain_size 0.0025
Vocabulary md, k = 30

Focal topics, by journal, over time

Conclusions

  • Most Pioneer-funded researchers did not publish heavily in MQ
  • MQ was the primary venue for one of two race science topics
  • The other race science topic did not originate in MQ


  • MQ was the primary venue for one form of race science
    • “Anthropology-flavored”?
  • While mainstream journals were the primary venues for a distinct form of race science
    • Psychological Reports, later Intelligence and PID
    • “Psychology-flavored”?
  • “The race science is coming from inside the house!”

Thanks!

https://mainstream-race-science.netlify.app

Bonus content

Some definitions

scientific racism
(purportedly) justifying racial inequality and colonialism by appealing to the epistemic authority of science
(compare Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin 1982)
race science - wide sense
scientific research that is amenable to scientific racism
race science - narrow sense
scientific research that itself engages in scientific racism


Ex: genotype clustering studies (Rosenberg et al. 2002) or polygenic scores for educational attainment (Harden et al. 2019) can be wide-sense race science without being narrow-sense race science (Wills 2017; Carlson and Harris 2020)

Different topics or different communities?

Authors by topic

Gould’s critique of factor analysis

As a tool for simplification, [PCA/factor analysis] has proved its great value in many disciplines. But many factorists have gone beyond simplification, and tried to define factors as causal entities. This error of reification has plagued the technique since its inception …. [F]actors, by themselves, are neither things nor causes; they are mathematical abstractions. (Gould 1996, 284–85)

  • tmfast uses methods from PCA and factor analysis (Rohe and Zeng 2020)
    • (partial) PCA
    • varimax rotation
  • Need to avoid hasty reification of topics

Topic modeling as phenomena construction

Topics as phenomena (Bogen and Woodward 1988; Woodward 2009)

  • simplified patterns extracted from word occurrence data
  • may or may not be stable:
    will we see the same topics in a different corpus? (Malaterre and Lareau 2022)
  • constructed with minimal role for substantive theory
  • explananda, not explanans

These words tend to be used together; but why?
These test items tend to be answered in the same way; but why?

References

Bogen, James, and James Woodward. 1988. “Saving the Phenomena.” The Philosophical Review 97 (3): 303–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2185445.
Carlson, Jedidiah, and Kelley Harris. 2020. “Quantifying and Contextualizing the Impact of bioRxiv Preprints Through Automated Social Media Audience Segmentation.” PLOS Biology 18 (9): e3000860. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000860.
Fernández Pinto, Manuela. 2017. “To Know or Better Not To.” Science & Technology Studies 30 (2): 53–72. https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.61030.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1996. The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Harden, K. Paige, Benjamin W. Domingue, Daniel W. Belsky, Jason D. Boardman, Robert Crosnoe, Margherita Malanchini, Michel Nivard, Elliot M. Tucker-Drob, and Kathleen Mullan Harris. 2019. “Genetic Associations with Mathematics Tracking and Persistence in Secondary School.” bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/598532.
Jackson, John P., Jr. 2005. Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown V. Board of Education. NYU Press.
Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, and Joseph N. Cappella. 2008. Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lewontin, Richard, Steven Rose, and Leo Kamin. 1982. “Bourgeois Ideology and the Origins of Biological Determinism.” Race & Class 24 (1): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/030639688202400101.
Malaterre, Christophe, Jean-François Chartier, and Davide Pulizzotto. 2019. “What Is This Thing Called Philosophy of Science ? A Computational Topic-Modeling Perspective, 1934–2015.” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 9 (2): 215–49. https://doi.org/10.1086/704372.
Malaterre, Christophe, and Francis Lareau. 2022. “The Early Days of Contemporary Philosophy of Science: Novel Insights from Machine Translation and Topic-Modeling of Non-Parallel Multilingual Corpora.” Synthese 200 (3): 242. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03722-x.
Mehler, Barry. 1989. “Foundation for Fascism: The New Eugenics Movement in the United States.” Patterns of Prejudice 23 (4): 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.1989.9970026.
Miller, Adam. 1994. “The Pioneer Fund: Bankrolling the Professors of Hate.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 6: 58–61. https://doi.org/10.2307/2962466.
Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. 2011. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York, NY, USA: Bloomsbury.
Rohe, Karl, and Muzhe Zeng. 2020. “Vintage Factor Analysis with Varimax Performs Statistical Inference.” arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2004.05387.
Rosenberg, Noah A., Jonathan K. Pritchard, James L. Weber, Howard M. Cann, Kenneth K. Kidd, Lev A. Zhivotovsky, and Marcus W. Feldman. 2002. “Genetic Structure of Human Populations.” Science 298 (5602): 2381–85. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1078311.
Saini, Angela. 2019. Superior: The Return of Race Science. Beacon Press.
Schaffer, Gavin. 2007. “‘“Scientific” Racism Again?’: Reginald Gates, the Mankind Quarterly and the Question of ‘Race’ in Science After the Second World War.” Journal of American Studies 41 (2): 253–78. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875807003477.
Tucker, William H. 2002. The funding of scientific racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Wills, Melissa. 2017. “Are Clusters Races? A Discussion of the Rhetorical Appropriation of Rosenberg Et Al.’s ‘Genetic Structure of Human Populations’.” Philosophy & Theory in Biology 9. https://doi.org/10.3998/ptb.6959004.0009.012.
Woodward, James F. 2009. “Data and Phenomena: A Restatement and Defense.” Synthese 182 (1): 165–79. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9618-5.